10/12 Essay: Read this press article on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a Chinese global infrastructure development plan. What are your thoughts, or more saliently, what questions do you have or what would you want to know/learn more about? What responsibilities do you think the international community should have (if any) on such matters?

The Belt and Road Initiative is a Chinese global infrastructure development plan. The Chinese are giving out loans to developing countries to build infrastructure there and using Chinese workers to create these structures. I think the idea is good, in that the Chinese are trying to help developing countries to become more developed, but they are not going about it in the right way. They are putting these countries into great amounts of debt which is also affecting China’s economy because their government depends on this money. Also, China is facing labor violations and corruption within this project.

I am still trying to understand why exactly China is being so “generous” by helping these countries, but then putting such high interest rates so that the countries might not even be able to pay them back. What is China getting out of this deal, except for having countries be in debt to it? The article mentioned the people of China worked on the projects to create the infrastructure, so is that why this initiative is important? It gives the workers something to create because China is already built up so much. I would want to learn more about how China’s economy is working, for example, the number of people working on this initiative, and how the banks are handling all of the loans. The article was mentioning billions of dollars are being loaned to these countries but where is it coming from and how are they financially stable given that the developing countries are going to take many years to repay it if they can.

I think the international community should be regulating how much China can be helping by creating infrastructure. It is important that developing countries are able to access resources to build infrastructure, but China’s interest rates are extremely high. The article mentioned these rates are about four times higher than other lenders with less time to pay it. I think the international community needs to either regulate how much the interest rates can be or limit how many countries China can be lenders with so less fall into debt, and China isn’t affected as much either.